


Prompt - Jedi - bonds - quirks

by Munnin



Series: The Star Wars Write Stuff challenge. [41]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-14
Updated: 2017-10-14
Packaged: 2019-01-17 06:15:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12359280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Munnin/pseuds/Munnin
Summary: In the months after the Battle of Endor, during the rise of the New Republic, Luke makes his way to Coruscant in hope of connecting with the fallen Jedi Order.





	Prompt - Jedi - bonds - quirks

Luke knew Leia wouldn’t understand. Why he needed to take off like this. Why he couldn’t tell her where he was going. She wouldn’t understand. Not yet. One day she might. But not yet. She had the republic to restore but there was something he needed to find. His past. His roots. A sense of belonging. 

He needed the Jedi Order. 

He felt bad that she hadn’t had the opportunity to know the last Jedi as he had known them. To know Ben – the old wizard of the Jundland Wastes. To know Obi-wan, the quiet and patient Jedi whose hand had guided Luke’s first steps into a world greater than his wildest childhood dream. 

Or mercurial Master Yoda and his quirks. One moment softly spoken and wise, the next sharp and critical. For all he had done his best, Luke knew he was always a disappointment to Yoda. Leia would have been a better student.

But then again, perhaps she had known them. Obi-wan at least. After all, her message had been for him. _Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope._

_My_ only hope. Not _our_ only hope. She reached out to him directly. 

Who was he to her? One of her father’s stories? A General - young and noble and vital. A warrior monk of a proud order. Was that the image she carried in her head? Was that who she looked for, when she sent her message with R2. A man Luke would never know – the true Obi-wan, before he gave up the trappings of the man he had been. Before he gave up his name and became ‘Old Ben’.

Maybe it was envy to know that part of Ben that drove Luke to go. Maybe it was the desire to feel connected. To be part of something bigger than himself. To not be last. To not be alone.

But there was bond there. That he could feel it. A line drawing him back. Connecting him to a past he knew so very little about. From himself to Vader, from Vader to Anakin. From Anakin to Obi-wan, from Obi-wan to Yoda. And back and back still to an Order of Jedi, so large it spread across the stars. A lineage. A family.

And that bond was what took him to Coruscant. To what remained of the Jedi Temple. 

The Coruscant Uprising was still in full swing, even months after the declaration of the New Republic. The former capital was too hotly contested. The New Republic had abandoned the city world and declared its new capital on Chandrila.

Too much of the ecumenopolis was still under Imperial control, even if there was no longer a united Empire for it to be held by. Too many former power players, now estranged, held sway in Coruscant. Fortified in their offices and palaces. Squads and garrisons of troopers defected or became personal guards; staying with their Imperial masters out of loyalty or opportunism, or under promise of payment. 

Or perhaps, like Luke, they longed to belong to something greater than themselves. 

He’d only ever seen holo images of the Jedi Temple before the Purge. The spires visible for kilometres even in the sprawling cityscape. But those spires were gone, leaving only ghostly after-images in Luke’s borrowed memories. 

The fire that had razed the uppermost floors had stolen away the temple’s iconic shape. And from its ashes had grown the Imperial Palace. A dark reflection of what had come before. 

It should have been impossible for Luke to get into the Palace Precinct. It was after all, the fortified heart of what remained of the Empire. A rallying ground for those who fervently believed the Emperor would return. Like pilgrims waiting for their fallen Messiah to rise again. 

But Luke felt the bond tug at him, like wind in his hair. Like the twirling dust-devils that warned of a coming sandstorm back on the farm. He was guided. The Force wanted him there. And so, a way would be found.

Here, a door left carelessly ajar while a trooper stepped out for a death stick. There, the sweet song of a shadowmoth, beating its fluted wings for the first time. A moment of casual beauty great enough to distract a guard, letting Luke slip by. And when no other path opened, a wave of his fingers to make those who saw him forget he was ever there. 

There was nothing left of the Jedi in those austere halls. Or so it felt. The Empire had swept it all away, replacing the temple’s grandeur with the imperial starkness. 

He brushed the walls, fingers outstretched and eyes closed as he walked, feeling what had been more than what was. Echoes of the past coming to him through the Force.

The stiff weave of tapestries, their threads wrapped in breath-thin strips of bronzium and tricopper, shining down the ages. 

The laugher of younglings glad to be free from the day’s lessons, keeping a ball made of rags in the air with little nudges of the Force. 

The serious contemplations of older padawans, trying to puzzle out some riddle of Master Yoda’s.

That memory made Luke laugh and he stopped, turning back to look at them, feeling the outline of them like warm breeze. One of the padawans seems to sense him there, looking up at directly at him. Decades removed by time but bound by place, Luke felt the young man’s eyes meet his, dark and serious. A long, handsome face, shorn hair revealing a district widow's peak. Luke knew they both feel it, the connection. They were part of a lineage, he and this youth. Not of blood but something else. Something deeper.

A droid moved in the corridor ahead and Luke looked away, the moment broken as he was forced to draw back to the shadows till it passed.

Had the youth remembered him? Told his friends or his master of the dark clad stranger, more felt than seen. Had Luke become a ghost story in these halls?

He followed the threads of time, down and down. Past what had been destroyed and rebuilt. Down into the stones beneath. The halls and passages forgotten. Unravaged by the Empire, lost behind grates rusted shut or boarded closed over time. Below the ground level of the modern city that had risen, building new on old. 

Nothing was ever lost, just forgotten. Just as the step below was forgotten as soon as traveller’s foot rose up to the next. 

But there in the deep heart of the temple, the mark of the Jedi remained. Carvings and statuary of such a distant time their meanings were lost. But not their power. 

Luke found himself drawn to a massive domed hall, the floor grey with dust. Tying a rag over his mouth and nose, he set about cleaning it, feeling the pull of what was beneath. 

With a crumbling broom he found and a vacuum extractor he salvaged and repaired, it took him the better part of a week to clean it all. But there was no hurry. This room was what he had come here for. He knew that now. 

And it had been worth it. Worth the cloying dust, worth the aching muscles, and long hours. Finally, it was done and he could sit at the centre of the dome, the single torch cupped in his hand. Its light reflected and refracted off the curved walls, off tiny tiles, too many to number.

The great mosaic stretched out from where he sat, climbing the great curve of the dome. It shone in every colour imaginable and some he knew could not be seen by his limited human eyes. Ribbons of colour wove, knotted, and parted again, as complex as the tapestries that had once graced the walls upstairs. 

Although there were no words to give the complex pattern context, Luke felt it – the purpose, the meaning of this space. Here were those who came before; each ribbon of colour a life. They touched, loved, trained, fought, stubbled, fell into darkness or rose again into the light. Leaving behind them echoes in those they touched, and the brightness they gave back to the Force.

 _Luminous beings are we._ Yoda’s words echo back to him across the years. And here Luke felt it, more than ever before. The energy that surrounded him, bound him. Not just to the living, but to those who came before. And those who would come after. To every life he touched, directly or distantly. And to every life that touched him. 

He raised his eyes slowly, a smile warming his lips as he felt them join him. Not just the familiar shades of Obi-wan and Yoda, but Anakin too. And others. 

A man with long hair and a challengingly playful smile. 

The youth from the hall above, now older. His widow’s peak peppered white but his dark eyes just as brilliant. A blonde woman at his side, cocky and willful. 

A tall, slender man with pale skin and the look of a scholar. 

And so on, and so on. With each breath, they multiplied. Branches of padawan and master and padawan again stretched away from him, as numerous as the tiles. Until they filled the dome and all of Luke’s vision. 

He was connected to them, part of them. As bound to each of them as they were to him.

For what seemed like an age, he meditated on them, with them; feeling their wisdom, their triumphs, their pride and compassion. But likewise, he felt their suffering, their regrets. Brutal deaths and spiralling despair. The dark side clouding the fates of many, pride turning to poison. 

It became too much and he closed his eyes and breathed out slowly, clearing his mind. He felt them fade, letting their clangour quieten. But knowing they would never truly leave him. 

When he opened his eyes, only one light remained. The man with the long hair and dancing smile. He stepped to Luke, large hands cupping Luke’s shoulders. 

In that moment, Luke knew him. Knew him as someone who had watched over him, over Obi-wan’s shoulder, all his life. “Qui-Gon.” He bowed his head respectfully.

“Luke.” Qui-Gon chuckled softly and ruffled dust out of Luke’s darkening hair like a passing breeze. “You’ve lingered down here long enough.” He looked Luke in the eye, his tone mocking grave. “You need some fresh air.”

Luke found himself smiling, warmed by Qui-Gon’s brotherly concern, wondering if this is how Obi-wan felt for his master. “I still have much to learn for you. From all of you.”

“No, you don’t.” Qui-Gon’s expression turned serious. “Be mindful of the living Force, young Luke. The past is a well of knowledge to draw on, but dwell too long and it can become an anchor, drawing you down. You don’t need to be here to reach for us. We are one with the Force as we are one with you. This place,” he gestures to the glittering curve of the roof, “you don’t need it to be near us.” 

“I need to understand what it means to be a Jedi.” Luke insisted. 

“You won’t learn that here. In the dust of the past. All this, all we can teach you is was it _was_ to be a Jedi. Our time is over. You need to go forward, live in the moment. Make your own way.” Qui-Gon shook his head, studying Luke’s face. “You are not alone, but you’re also not beholden to those who came before you. To traditions that fell and burnt and died. Your path is yours to make. You are not the last of us. You are the first of you. Find others, teach them if that’s what you feel is right. But build your way for those to come, not those already gone.”

Luke closed his eyes, feeling Qui-Gon’s ghostly lips brush his forehead. “Thank you, Master.”

He left the temple in the dark of night, climbing his way up to the roof of the Imperial Palace. A mist wound between the towers of the ecumenopolis, dewing his hair and lashes with cool moisture. Not solidness of rain or the oppressive humidity of Yavin IV; this was a caress. And in it he felt them – 

Anakin’s thrilled laugher as he hurtled through the city in a ‘borrowed’ speeder.  
Obi-wan dancing with a beautiful woman on some distant world, living utterly in that one stolen moment.  
Qui-Gon’s smug smile as Padma revealed herself as Queen of the Naboo, knowing he’d just won a bet with Obi-wan.  
Padma, smiling at him from a sun-dappled balcony.

With that memory in his heart, he headed back. There was so much he wanted to teach Leia.


End file.
